How do you use social media to engage an audience? | Digital Marketing Institute

Key Takeaways

social media is an essential digital channel to engage an audience and distribute your content effectively just put it out there you know it can be seen as an outbound Channel when a brand pushes their message out there however it does become an inbound channel once a consumer starts engaging and that's a key differentiator but let's actually look at some considerations when we're thinking about including social media within our channel part of our media mix okay the first one is cost obviously cost is top of mind what can we do what can we get there the main costs of engaging with consumers via social media include time actually you know from the length of time it takes to create and curate a community to actually producing the content and the assets required to nurture them again and again and again it takes a lot of time to do that stuff it's our first cost our second cost is resources so social posting software content production media budgets all of these are main resource costs how can we get that into the mix and how can we deal with this and finally it's really important is staff managing a social channel managing the community briefing designers gathering content reporting and demonstrating the value of the channel requires specific skills and a dedicated person to do it effectively they're all costs we have to consider but it's all achievable and it's all doable within the digital marketing context an important consideration now for any social media strategy is consumer mindset so it's essential to recognize that consumers are in different mindsets when they're on different social networks for example the mindset of someone on LinkedIn is really professional to thinking about kind of jobs and that kind of activity where is the mindset of someone on snapchat is more lighter and fun-filled two very different mindsets and must consider when choosing their channels and when deciding a what channel to choose as part of our social media mix we must take to type in the tone of the channel into account just to determine if it aligns with our brand and our campaign messaging it might not be the right thing or might be derived mcfish we have to figure that out ourselves and we do this by stress testing if a channel on the message encourage social media users to react to your campaign or content in a valuable manner to other engagement or conversion so just sense check this sense tech your your choices simply by asking a couple of questions firstly is this the right channel for my audience and my brand that's a key question to ask is this the right consumer mindset from my objective is the ad messaging and tone right for this audience all important questions key to successfully engaging an audience is the ability actually to identify your audience personas based on their value to the business this is an important driver their value to the business personas help your help you focus your efforts because allows you to create the kind of content an online social media experience that will be most relevant to your high-value personas again the ones that are worth most to your business and your bottom line so this streamlines your workload it streamlines your workload and allows you to prioritize the activities that would be most useful to the highest value audiences again focus on business outcomes and when creating personas just consider how this translates into social media channel behaviors in terms of well actually what content is likely to deliver on your KPIs or your objectives because again we're always objective focused activities this is especially important really when creating content for awareness or conversion goals cause they're very different what goal is it always verify the appropriateness of your content and delivering your KPIs really just against those valuable personas that's your sense check that keeps you on track and that keeps you focused on those core business goals and opportunities